The Impact of Vaccination on COVID-19 Pandemic in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq: A Mathematical Modelling

The spreading of COVID-19 became a global issue that had a significant impact on health, life, and economic sectors. Efforts from all over the world are focused on discussing a variety of healthcare approaches to reduce the effect of COVID-19 among individuals. Mathematical tools with numerical simulations are important approaches that help international efforts to determine critical transmission factors as well as controlling the virus spread. In this paper, we develop a mathematical model that considers a vaccination compartment in terms of ordinary differential equations. This study focuses on the real data of confirmed cases in Kurdistan Region of Iraq from July 17th, 2021 to January 1st, 2022. Model results and real data for the total number of infected people were compared using computational tools in MATLAB. Additionally, non-normalization, half-normalization, and full-normalization methods are used to determine the local sensitivities between model variables and parameters. Interestingly, computational results show that the dynamics of model results and real confirmed cases are very close to each other. Accordingly, the elasticity coefficients provide a great understanding of the impact of vaccination on transmissions. The model results here can also help international efforts for further suggestions and improvements to control this disease more effectively. © Palestine Polytechnic University-PPU 2023.